Uranium: leave it in the ground!
By Jennifer Thompson
The Australian government's gentle protests over French nuclear testing plans cannot conceal Australia's role in creating and maintaining the nuclear danger. Australian diplomats were among the firmest in pushing for extension of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) without any limitations on the five nuclear powers whose monopoly the treaty protects. And Australian uranium is an important component of the international nuclear regime — ironically including, in at least a few cases, French weapons production.
The profits of the big companies that own Australia's uranium mining and export industry have dictated the ALP government's real policy. This is despite the party formally adopting an anti-uranium mining policy in 1977. The remaining impediments to "open slather" mining and export of uranium are testimony to the pro-peace and environment sentiments in Australian society, despite the best efforts of the pro-big business pragmatists in the ALP.
The 1977 ALP policy called for uranium mines to be shut down, and for existing export contracts to be repudiated. At a 1979 Sydney rally that Prime Minister Paul Keating (then opposition spokesperson on minerals and energy) might not want to remember, or be remembered, he and ALP federal leader Bill Hayden and NSW Premier Neville Wran all spoke firmly in support of the ALP's anti-uranium stand.
Hayden said, "There is only one ALP policy: total opposition to mining, processing and export of uranium. A Labor government will repudiate any contracts signed by non-Labor governments." Keating's speech at the rally drew the link between uranium mining and nuclear proliferation — a link the ALP leaders have steadfastly denied over many years since. "The mining of uranium inevitably leads to an increase in the war danger."
The moves to water down the policy began after the ACTU executive voted in December 1981 to lift its 1979 ban on exporting uranium oxide, signalling that the ALP's key union officials were prepared to fall into line. Between $40 and $50 million worth of yellowcake passed through Darwin within months of the decision.
Changing the ALP's uranium policy was a key element in its drive to win big business support for its election in 1983. Amendments to the policy were made at the July 1982 ALP national "Preparing for Government" conference under which mining could continue for an indefinite period. An ALP government would then "consider applications for the export of uranium mined incidentally to the mining of other minerals".
The permission for uranium mining "incidental" to other mining was aimed squarely at opening the Roxby Downs (now called Olympic Ponds) uranium mine in South Australia, which was estimated to have 4 million tonnes of uranium ore, making it potentially the biggest uranium mine in the world.
After winning government in 1983 Prime Minister Bob Hawke strongly criticised French nuclear testing in the Pacific. Meanwhile, in August he gave the go-ahead for mining at Roxby Downs. Hawke authorised Roxby export licences until 1996, and Ranger and Nabarlek licences until 1988.
Following a record 300,000 turnout for the annual Palm Sunday peace marches in 1983, ALP leaders began working on ways of changing ALP policy without a lengthy public fight.
Avoiding a federal caucus discussion on the change of policy until he was sure of the numbers in cabinet, Hawke then imposed "cabinet solidarity", silencing or forcing out any remaining cabinet opposition. On November 5, 1983, with dissenters in cabinet gagged on the issue, the parliamentary caucus approved uranium exports.
Hawke simply ignored a declaration of 400 delegates to a special Victorian branch conference that the uranium decision was unconstitutional.
Strong anti-uranium votes at ALP state conferences in 1984 persuaded the ALP leaders to drop plans to push an "open slather" uranium policy through that year's national conference. The conference adopted a policy similar to that of caucus, accepting centre-left leader Peter Cook's proposal for the three-mine position.
The new policy allowed the Ranger and Nabarlek mines in the Northern Territory and Roxby Downs in South Australia to continue, while new mines were prohibited. The 1983 ban on uranium sales to France was continued, despite a call by then foreign minister Bill Hayden to fulfil the existing contracts — only one day after he condemned four French nuclear tests in May and June.
While the machine politicians of the ALP left licked their wounds, thousands of rank-and-file ALP members walked out to join the Nuclear Disarmament Party, which surged to prominence in the three months before the December 1984 federal election. Left faction members who chose to stay with the ALP defended the new position. It was an anti-uranium policy, they said, because once the three mines were exhausted, the industry would be phased out.
A colder look at reality made it clear that the continued existence of the three mines ensured that the uranium mining industry was alive and well. The commitments for the Ranger mine alone in 1984 totalled 40,000 tonnes lasting until 1996. Nabarlek mine was contracted with Finland until 1989, and the Australian government stockpile has contracts until 1996.
In August 1986, Hawke allowed Queensland Mines — owner of the Nabarlek project — to export 2600 tonnes of uranium to France. In January 1988, Energy Resources Australia (ERA), which owns Ranger, signed a contract with the major French electricity utility to supply 100 tonnes of uranium each year from 1988 to 1998.
The contract showed that the uranium industry was gearing up for another push to expand. The case was kicked off by a report from South Australian Labor backbencher Gordon Bilney in mid-May 1988. Bilney claimed that uranium exports could be expanded to generate an additional $5 billion in revenue by 1992, including $1.5 billion in government revenue.
Within the Labor Party, the left argued against mining from an economic viewpoint — that the state of the market meant more mines would only drive the price down, making it harder to turn a profit. In contrast, former Nuclear Disarmament Party Senator Jo Vallentine argued on May 19, 1988: "If Australians consider that there are good reasons for not mining uranium, like the end use to which it could be put, the environmental costs of mining and the problems of radioactive wastes, then no amount of financial inducements justify the expansion of uranium mining."
Successive ALP conferences have pushed the issue aside, as strong anti-uranium sentiment made the policy change politically unpalatable. Despite this the uranium industry continues to lobby strongly for open slather. Prior to the 1994 ALP conference, Senator Bob Collins, minister for primary industry and a member of the ALP right, and Gordon Bilney, minister for Pacific island affairs and a member of the centre-left faction, both publicly called for the current three-mines policy to be scrapped.
Bilney said that Australia, already supplying 10% of the world's uranium market, could raise the level to 30% if the policy was changed. These figures have been strongly disputed by environmental campaigners, led by Friends of the Earth, who have produced their own study.
The August 8 Business Review Weekly indicated that the mining companies were preparing the ground to make reinterpretation of the policy as easy as possible. Energy Resources Australia (ERA) changed the name of its Jabiluka deposit, 20 kilometres from the existing Ranger mine, to "North Ranger". BRW also reported that ERA planned to truck ore from the "North Ranger" mine to the existing mill at Ranger, mill it there and dispose of the tailings there.
Despite industry pressure, Labor number-crunchers' judgment of public feeling led them to pass over uranium mining expansion at the 1994 conference in return for left acquiescence on forest exploitation, foreign policy and privatisation issues.
One of the arguments for the export of Australian uranium is that it can be "permitted subject to stringent conditions of supply designed to strengthen the non-proliferation regime". This argument received an airing in the Slatyer (Australian Science and Technology Council) report commissioned by Hawke in 1983 to justify the change in ALP policy. Greenpeace responded at the time by pointing to a dilemma:
"The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) combines the contradictory role of promoting nuclear power while trying to prevent the diversion of nuclear materials to weapons production.
"The link between the civilian and military industry is obvious. Nuclear reactors produce plutonium, suitable for weapons production, during normal operations ... The task for the IAEA is impossible."
The Greenpeace argument was backed by the example of India, which tested a nuclear bomb in 1974. The explosion used plutonium developed in a "civilian" research reactor.
Other countries outside the NPT have also tested bombs. The joint Israeli-South African nuclear bomb program ran for 20 years, culminating in explosions in 1979 and 1980, observed and recorded by the US Defence Intelligence Agency. Israel is now known to have over 200 nuclear warheads and, courtesy of US patronage, remains outside the NPT.
The Australian government refusal to supply uranium to countries which don't comply with NPT safeguards on that uranium has been argued by some of the pro-uranium forces to justify sales. But as has been amply demonstrated in the French, Chinese and US cases, NPT signatories are still involved in maintaining and expanding their nuclear arsenals.
Major concerns were raised in 1988 that Australian uranium might still be finding its way into weapons through the practice of "flag swapping" between uranium sellers under the aegis of the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom).
The concern about "flag swaps" arose in February 1988, when a dismissed employee from Nukem, the West German uranium brokerage and fuel-cycle firm embroiled in a bribery scandal, sent confidential internal documents from Nukem to a Green Party MP in the European Parliament and to the West German magazine Der Spiegel.
Confidential Euratom memos revealed three types of uranium "swaps", all of which can happen without any actual movement of materials. The leaked Nukem documents contain details of "flag-swapping" deals, in which uranium supplies are given false origins in order to appear to comply with safeguards.
One such documented deal resulted in Australian uranium being enriched to weapons grade, for use in the Institut Laue-Langevin reactor in Grenoble, France, in violation of Australian safeguards. However, according to Nukem, by the time this happened the uranium concerned was, on paper, of US, not Australian, origin.
The then minister for resources, Peter Cook, responded to questions from Democrat Senator Norm Sanders and Nuclear Disarmament Party Senator Rob Wood, by claiming, "In the Grenoble case ... Australia was not responsible for the uranium enriched at that research facility".
In a ministerial statement on April 20 1988, Cook washed the government's hands of safeguards on Australian uranium designed to prevent the development of weapons grade material once it had reached Euratom's sphere of responsibility.
An area of increasing interest to the Australian uranium and nuclear industry is Indonesian plans to build 12 nuclear reactors on the earthquake-prone island of Java. The first US$3 billion plant, to be built 30 km from the "extinct" Mt Muria volcano, has been brought forward, according to an announcement in August by the head of Indonesia's Atomic Energy Agency (BATAN).
It is expected to be completed by 1996, with work on a second US$2 billion plant in central Java beginning in 1996. The remaining 10 reactors for Java — an island with 28 active volcanoes and 100 dormant ones that experiences two or three tremors daily — are to be completed by 2015.
The reactor favoured by Indonesia is a Westinghouse-Mitsubishi pressurised water type (PWR) similar to the one which nearly melted down in 1979 on Three Mile Island. In February 1991 a Westinghouse-Mitsubishi PWR almost melted down at Mihama in Japan.
Indonesia is moving into nuclear power at a time when costs, accidents and the problems of waste disposal are closing down reactors in the First World. About 76 have shut down, mostly in North America, Europe and Japan, and new reactors proposed are rarely moving beyond the drawing board. The nuclear industry is reacting by targeting Third World countries.
Writing to the Australian Conservation Foundation in 1993, foreign affairs and trade minister Gareth Evans said that Indonesia's decision on nuclear power "could ultimately put it at the forefront of regional development in terms of modern nuclear technology ... it is in Australia's interest that there be close contact and cooperation in this area".
While Evans has remained coy on the contents of the Australia-Indonesia Nuclear Science and Cooperation Agreement, signed in 1993, he has admitted to "informal" talks on supplying Indonesia with uranium.
The uranium industry is less inhibited. The Japanese company involved in building the first reactor, the Mitsubishi consortium tied to Kansai Electric, is also a 10% stakeholder in ERA and a partner in the Japan-Australia Uranium Resources Development Company. In 1991 a delegation of BATAN officials visited ERA's Ranger mine, later announcing that Indonesia would be happy to import Australian uranium. Prior to that a deal was set between Ranger and Olympic Ponds, which also supplies Kansai with uranium, to split uranium sales to Indonesia fifty-fifty.
Australian government claims that cooperation between the two countries will "provide ... assurance that high safety standards continue to be maintained" have been met with scepticism by environmental campaigners. Greenpeace's Jean McSorley said that if the Australian government had serious concerns about the environmental impact of nuclear power, "they would not be supporting Indonesia's program to go nuclear".
Prior to the 1994 ALP conference, a coalition of environment and peace groups called on the ALP's centre left faction to recognise that Australian uranium directly contributes to international nuclear proliferation. The scrapping of the three mines limit would escalate the risk of proliferation in the region, it said.
Speaking on the eve of the 1994 Hiroshima Day anniversary, WA Greens Senator Dee Margetts made the link between the nuclear fuel cycle and nuclear weapons production: "By 2003, commercial nuclear power reactors will produce sufficient surplus plutonium to build another 47,000 nuclear weapons. The world currently has 425 reactors in 30 countries, which gives each of these countries the potential to develop their own nuclear capability."
Australia has a lot to gain from peace and stability in the region, and a lot to lose from the political instability that can ensue from nuclear capability. The end result of uranium mining is a highly dangerous radioactive waste for which there is still no safe, permanent method of disposal as well as the danger of nuclear accidents. The message is clear — uranium should stay in the ground.